#Feminist theory

[whereserpentswalk]

The 'women can wear pants' leaving peoples' bodies when a woman is trans.

[maxdibert]

They butchered all female characters and it's true, but people can simply don't like Sansa's chapters or don't enjoy her character because she's classist. She thinks bastards are beneath her in earlier chapters and in Alyanne. She's disgusted by Arya spending time with Butcher boy and other peasants because they're beneath her.

I'm not saying she's s bad person or the worst one or that we should blame her for being passive while being hostage. She's a kid, she's s victim, she can still have a positive change. but I'm reminding that saying people are misogynist because they don't like her is a reach. And it's not that people hate her, they just point out things she did or thought about in canon and her fans scream "you hate her! You hate women!" No. It's okay to not like a character, you can point out their flaws, it doesn't make you a mysoginist.

Oh, trust me, the issue isn’t that people simply don’t like Sansa—it’s why they don’t like her and the patterns that emerge when you look at how traditionally feminine female characters are treated in fandom discourse.

See, I don’t care if someone criticizes Sansa for her classism. That’s a valid discussion. I don’t care if someone dislikes her personality. Not every character is for everyone. But let’s not pretend that the dominant criticism Sansa gets in fandom spaces has ever been about her early prejudices. No one’s out here writing essays about how Sansa Stark needs to deconstruct her internalized feudal biases. What do we see instead?

“Sansa is useless.” “She’s weak.” “She’s stupid.” “She just stands there and does nothing while other people suffer.” “She should have done something.”

And that’s where misogyny enters the chat.

Because when you actually break these takes down, what they boil down to is that people resent Sansa for not being proactive in the way that they think a strong female character should be. She’s written as a character whose resilience is passive rather than active, who survives through adaptability rather than aggression, and fandom hates that. This is a known trend in media reception.

Feminist film and literature studies have examined this bias for decades. De Beauvoir discusses how femininity is traditionally coded as passive, and because of that, it is devalued in comparison to traditionally masculine-coded traits like physical strength, direct confrontation, and assertiveness. Susan Faludi discusses how women who embody traditional femininity often face more ridicule than those who adopt “strong” or “unconventional” roles. And the male gaze, as theorized by Laura Mulvey, conditions audiences to respond more favorably to female characters who are active participants in traditionally masculine-coded spaces—combat, strategy, direct rebellion—while dismissing those who navigate systems through softer, less immediately visible means.

Sansa fits this mold perfectly. She does not fight with a sword, she does not make grand speeches, she does not take direct violent action, so fandom deems her “useless.” But here’s the catch—this standard is not applied equally.

Think about how Tyrion is treated for his ability to navigate the political landscape through words rather than force. Is he called “useless” for not picking up a sword and charging into battle? No—because intellect and political maneuvering, even when nonviolent, are still considered active and thus valuable in a way that Sansa’s more passive survival is not.

Now, compare Sansa’s treatment to Arya’s. Arya is beloved in fandom spaces, and yes, she has her own set of haters, but notice how different the tone of that criticism is. Arya is rarely called “useless.” She is rarely ridiculed for being afraid. She is allowed to be traumatized, to make mistakes, to be messy and complicated in ways that Sansa is not—because Arya performs a more masculine-coded form of resilience. She fights, she kills, she runs, she rebels.

And just to be clear, none of this means that Arya’s arc is bad or that her popularity is undeserved. The problem isn’t that Arya is liked—it’s that traditionally feminine resilience is not. The issue is that Sansa is not disliked because of her flaws in isolation, but because those flaws reinforce her femininity, and femininity is what people are actually responding negatively to.

This is why calling Sansa hate misogynistic is not a reach. It’s not about saying that everyone has to like her. It’s about looking at the larger pattern of why she is dismissed, why she is mocked, and why so many people cannot accept a female character whose form of strength does not align with masculine-coded ideals.

So no, I’m not saying that every single person who dislikes Sansa is a raging misogynist. But I am saying that if your criticism boils down to “she’s useless, she’s weak, she’s stupid,” you should probably examine why those specific critiques keep coming up for female characters who embody traditional femininity. Because it’s not a coincidence.

[ftmtftm]

You all realize Feminists have been critiquing "women only spaces" for decades right?

I think often about Audre Lorde's critique of a women only event that welcomed her wife and daughter, but not her son. Because she questioned it - the function and purpose of barring even the sons of Feminist women from Feminist events. Especially the barring of her young Black son, who would otherwise be left alone in the city where he would be more prone to the very violence those same Feminist women claimed to want to change.

Because what functional, forward thinking Feminist purpose does it actually serve to do that? What message does that send to women with sons, husbands, brothers, lovers, friends, who want to involve the men and boys in their lives in their activism? Who want to build a functionally better world for us all outside of the oppressive grasp of Patriarchy? Especially for the marginalized men who often sit at their own intersection violent Patriarchal oppression, that still happens to be Patriarchal oppression despite it not being distinctly misogyny?

What purpose does it truly serve to sequester yourself away into a pocket of the world, detached from those you share it with? What bright and shining future does that really promise you?

[yapoholics-anonymous]

"it's woman's responsibility to be assaulted correctly"

[hadesoftheladies]

some of you think your meek, patriarchal mothers never had any strong feminist attitudes in their youth and you do so to your own detriment. radicalized women have always existed. they were just neutralized by the patriarchal institution of marriage. that has consistently been one of the biggest threats to women's liberation and is the primary catalyst for women's widespread suffering in the first place.

[notsoanonymousfemcel]

marxist feminism

as much as i appreciate and agree with marxist feminism and what it has done for feminist theory and organizing, when they (Marxist feminists) start talking about how women's oppression stems from capitalism they lose me. the patriarchy predates capitalism, after the fall of capitalism patriarchy will still be here.

[crumblinggothicarchitecture]

Someone smarter than me needs to do an in-depth analysis on how swift weaponizes sex. So many of her lyrics involve cheating as revenge and picking fights with her partners about other girls. She makes it sound like some godly privilege to be with her and if she masterminded her way into your life you're just soooo lucky. Even "touch me while your bros play GTA" plays into that. Like "why would you want to have fun and game with your friends when ill let you finger me". (Sidenote a bunch of her lyrics and all of Me! sounds like an abusive partner daring you to leave and dare to find someone better) It's creepy how she's so juvenile and egotistical at the same time. She's mastered the "any mention of my bfs, even the underage ones, is slutshaming" move and uses it to get out of any criticism. Like, have all the sex you want be safe whatever but don't act like some sad little girl who got taken advantage of when the game you started goes poorly.

Ask, and ye shall receive. Because this a very insightful observation! Thanks!

It is true that Swift clearly uses sex and sexuality like a "gotcha" moment. I was always quite perturbed by her songs that glorify cheating. It's just so strange, but I think it ties into her enjoyment of revenge fantasies. Anyway, I was planning to write about how Swift's music often engages with and reinforces heteropatriarchal social standards. I think your idea adds an interesting new layer to the ways in which she manipulates through sex- both in the performance of passivity to masculine authority, as the patriarchy, and the ways in which she commodifies female sexuality by weaponizing it.

You're right it's incredibly egotistical and juvenile.

Also, I have a major bone to pick with the way Taylor Swift uses feminism to shut down criticism- like OMG do I have a problem with her there. She's only ever spent her career crying about how "women who talk bad about me are bad women" yet, she never really does or says anything actually feminist. In fact, most of her music, like I said above, reinforces the patriarchy. She herself is guilty of so much slut-shaming, too. I will go into detail, with a real argument, in a separate post soon. And I thank you for pointing out the weaponized sexuality aspect of her, often, overtly patriarchal tone.

BTW- "ME!" is Such a weird song -> "I know that I went psycho on the phone" uhh... excuse me?

[cyber-corp]

I’d like to read into some feminist theory books, but I don’t really know where to start. Anyone have any suggestions?

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/specious

1 : having a false look of truth or genuineness : sophistic specious reasoning 2 : having deceptive attraction or allure 3 obsolete : showy

--

Noam Chomsky: If you look at what's happening, I think it's pretty easy to figure out what's going on. I mean, suppose you are a literary scholar at some elite university. Or, you know, anthropologist or whatever. I mean, if you do your work seriously, that’s fine, you know. But you don’t get any big prizes for it.

On the other hand, you take a look over in the rest of the university and you’ve got these guys in the physics department and the math department and they have all kinds of complicated theories, which of course we can’t understand, but they seem to understand them. And they have, you know, principles and they deduce complicated things from the principles and they do experiments and they find either they work or they don’t work. And that’s really, you know, impressive stuff.

So I want to be like that too. I want to have a theory. In the humanities, you know, literary criticism, anthropology and so on, there’s a field called theory. We’re just like the physicists. They talk incomprehensibly, we can talk incomprehensibly. They have big words, we’ll have big words. They draw, you know, far-reaching conclusions, we’ll draw far-reaching conclusions. We’re just as prestigious as they are.

Now if they say, well look, we’re doing real science and you guys aren’t, that’s white male, sexist, you know, bourgeois or whatever the answer is. How are we any different from them?

==

I worry that when I describe this idiocy as "fraud," people think I'm exaggerating, being hyperbolic or otherwise overstating it.

I'm not. If anything, I'm understating it.

All of this postmodern crap we're dealing with is completely fake. All this ridiculous intersectional jargon is a big grift. All of these domains producing this ridiculous nonsense are bogus and corrupt. All the scholarship they produce is fraudulent. It's fake from top to bottom.

All of it.

These people are cloaking asinine retardation in fancy words to cover up how asinine and retarded this asinine retardation is.

The people producing it are shallow and stupid. Not to mention, envious and spiteful about the status and authority of science. They just use absurd jargon to hide that fact and trick you into thinking it's too deep and profound for you to understand. But when it's decoded into simple English, à la the Tweet summaries above, the retarded, moronic nature becomes obvious.

The response to this kind of ridiculous shit needs to be laughter and derision, not tenure or a tertiary qualification.

We have to get rid of it because it's destroying our societies.

[rabiaticism]

"Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present (...) Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won."

— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

[hairtusk]

Andrea Dworkin, 'The Promise of the Ultra Right', in Right-Wing Women (1983)

[werewiire]

It was adult, white, wealthy males in this country who first read and fell in love with the Harry Potter books. Though written by a British female … J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books are clever modern reworkings of the English schoolboy novel. Harry as our modern-day hero is the supersmart, gifted, blessed, white boy genius (a mini patriarch) who "rules" over the equally smart kids, including an occasional girl and an occasional male of color. But these books also glorify war, depicted as killing on behalf of the "good."

The Harry Potter movies glorify the use of violence to maintain control over others. In Harry Potter: The Chamber of Secrets violence when used by the acceptable groups is deemed positive. Sexism and racist thinking in the Harry Potter books are rarely critiqued. Had the author been a ruling-class white male, feminist thinkers might have been more active in challenging the imperialism, racism, and sexism of Rowling's books.

— bell hooks, The Will to Change

[out-of-the-forest-i-come]

Feminist Non-Fiction Recs

Because feminism isn't only about your own voice and your own rights, but about the liberation of all women, it's important to uplift the voices of women who are rarely heard. To honour this international day of Women's Rights, here are some recommendations for non-fiction feminist theory books centered on women of colour.

Please note that this is a non-exhaustive list, and that some very important works might not figure on it. Take it as inspiration, not as a binding list of works to have read, and remember that this is only the surface of women of colour's writings on feminism.

all of bell hooks' books, but I would recommend "Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism" to start with intersectional feminism

There Is No Hierarchy of Oppression; by Audre Lorde

Sister Outsider; by Audre Lorde (all of Audre Lorde, actually)

Hood Feminism; by Mikki Kendall

White Tears, Brown Scars; by Ruby Hamad

Mediocre; Ijeoma Oluo

We Should All Be Feminists; by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This Bridge Called My Back; an anthology edited by Cherr��e Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Bad Feminist; by Roxane Gay

I Am Malala; by Malala Yousafzai

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment; by Patricia Hill Collins

Arab & Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, & Belonging; an anthology edited by Rabab Abduhaldi, Evelyn Alsultany and Nadine Naber

Making Space for Indigenous Feminism; an anthology edited by Joyce Green

Beyond Veiled Clichés: The Real Lives of Arab Women; by Amal Awad

The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism; by Kyla Schuller

A Decolonial Feminism; Françoise Vergès

Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower; by Brittney Cooper

Women, Race, & Class; by Angela Y. Davis

These books really only scrape the surface of an intersectional approach of feminism focused on race, and if you want to discover more works, I would recommend looking at intersectional feminism and decolonial feminism. Also, if you're not a native English speaker or if you speak fluently multiple languages, I recommend looking for feminist books originally written in other languages that may not have been translated to English, as they offer a perspective that is not so American-centered, which I feel is the case in too much of today's feminism.

[medusa-is-a-terf]

I‘m working on a translation from marxfem Alexandra Kollontais lectures about women’s material history, because I didn’t found an english version of the text and I think it should be aviable, even if I use deepl for the majority of it, due to my limited english skills. You can read it on my wattpad account, I just uploaded two lectures.

[crumblinggothicarchitecture]

thoughts on "i'm just a girl" thing being trendy as to girls can't do math, drive and can't be smart?

It's repackaged pro-patriarchy propaganda. Same with the "bimbo-ism" trend from a little while ago- women think they are satirizing this phenomenon, or that they are reclaiming it, however satire falls short when there is no inversion of social characteristics happening within the narrative.

For example, the classic " A Modest Proposal" takes the moral standard of not eating your own children- and turns it into the obvious correct choice of action. That inversion of moral status-quo is the punchline of the satire. It's the hinge that reveals the hypocrisy of the those enforcing harmful ideological stances on the public. This trend of "I'm just a girl" is not inverting any social phenomenon, nor is it making a statement of moral integrity by flipping something heinous into something normal to point out the dominant ideological social standards as harmful. Instead, it's only further perpetuating the dominant ideological social standards- without challenge by replicating things women have fought so hard to prove false in stupid Tik Toks.

Others, who are also participating in the trend are simply re-enforcing patriarchal stereotypes because they are actually sexist.

-__-

Thank you for asking me a non- Taylor Swift related question <3 apologies for taking so long to get to it- hope you are well and thriving even in such a difficult world.

The only Swift I vibe with is Jonathan Swift.

[slippingintostones]

How do I love other women when they don’t realize the context of society and love themselves despite their obviously misogynistic leanings and behaviors?

How do I get past my internalized misogyny when other women are relying on men to interact in society?